Chemotherapy: still an essential player in non-small-cell lung cancer treatment?

Substantial advances have been made in understanding critical molecular and cellular mechanisms driving tumor initiation; these findings have led to the discovery of a variety of novel drug targets and the development of new treatment strategies. The treatment of non-small-cell lung cancer patients harboring gain-of-function hotspot mutations in EGFR gene or an ALK gene rearrangement, has provided an impressive clinical benefit and changed the management of this disease. The standard of care with cytotoxic chemotherapy empirically based on a patient's clinicopathologic features is no longer acceptable. Nevertheless, chemotherapy still bears a crucial role in all subsets of patients diagnosed with non-small-cell lung cancer. This article aims to describe the emergence of these new treatment strategies and update the role of chemotherapy in the current setting.